First thread. I'm just going to rant this out to nowhere because it might help me calm down. I came back a week ago from a short visit to the UK from my home in the Schengen area and went by train because it is a beautiful time of the year and also to go through the
tunnel before it silts up. All went smoothly right up until the border in the Gare du Nord. One minute I'm looking at trains going all over, no fuss, no bother, next I'm in a specially separated part of the station festooned with Union Jacks and officialdom.
The message is clear. This is somewhere different. It's not just not Schengen, it is not Europe. They can gussy it up with pot plants all they like but it feels like a very hard and unfriendly border, a feeling compounded by arriving in London
to troop past a dozen police and border guards, some armed. It looked and felt really really terrible. I imagine going through the Berlin Wall felt similar. Imagine the flag taking on sinister connotations. Over the following week the flag thing everywhere started to bother me
along with the heavy emphasis on British this and British that. I have been a citizen of nowhere for over 30 years and although British exceptionalism has always irked me it is now weaponised to an alarming extent.
In brief to my eyes the country is changing faster than I think anyone may realise and I think the target is the youth. This toxic nationalism could be normalised for them and to question it could be deemed unpatriotic, even treasonous.
Remember how quickly East and West Europe diverged and how those differences are still being worked out to this day. Very quick to happen. Very difficult to reverse. There could be a moment of no ,or painfully slow, return. Brexit has made me angry. Now it is scaring me.
Thanks for responses. It was the rapidity of the changes on the ground that hit me. The resistance is brilliant but they’ve moved this so fast,normalised chaos so quickly that I fear we’ve been outmaneuvered. For now. We’ll win in the end. We always do.
